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‘Dune: Part Three’ Cowriter Brian K. Vaughan Has a New Comic on the Way
Brian K. Vaughan would like to apologize. He knows everyone is dying for details about Dune: Part Three, which he cowrote with director Denis Villeneuve, but his lips are pretty sealed until December 18 when the film finally hits theaters.
“Sorry to be coy,” he says as we’re about to leave the New York coffee shop where we’ve been chatting. “I hope the day will come where I’m able to say much, much more. It was truly so awesome. I can’t believe it happened.”
Vaughan is in the city for New York Comic Con, but not to talk about Dune. Ostensibly, he came to the convention to talk about Paper Girls, the comic he created with Cliff Chiang that was turned into a 2022 Amazon Prime Video series. During the Paper Girls panel, however, the pair announced that they’re working on a new comic, Roam, a superhero sci-fi series set to come out in February of next year.
Roam, Vaughan tells me, came from a deep desire to work with Chiang again. They’d considered doing a short eight-page story or maybe a one-shot, but eventually they said “Fuck it. Let’s do an ongoing series.”
Vaughan has the kind of career writers of a certain ilk would kill for. He started working on comics in the 1990s and has been the pen behind favorites like Saga, Y: The Last Man, and Marvel’s Runaways. (Those last two got turned into TV series; the outlier, Saga, is a story people have wanted to see adapted for years.) He also served as a writer on Lost and created CBS’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Under the Dome.
Still, his heart remains in comics. “I think sometimes people are like, ‘Oh, are you just going to sell out, Vaughan? Are you just going to go to Hollywood full-time?’” he says. “But I’m only able to do work in Hollywood because I have comics.”
Here, he speaks about Roam, his worries about AI, and maybe a little bit about Dune: Part Three as well.
It's completely unlike Paper Girls, completely unlike anything I've ever done. It’s set in the distant, distant future. The logline, as it were, is that in the future, everyone will get to be a superhero, but only while they're young. We're trying not to reveal too much more than that.
I remember seeing The Matrix, and having no idea what the fuck it was gonna be about. That was such a delight. So we're trying to do that here. I've been doing this for 31 years. I started when I was a teenager. I have a Spider-Man story here and there. I did a little Batman, and Ex Machina was my sci-fi political comic that sort of deconstructed the superhero. But this is certainly my first true superhero book.
On his fears about AI impacting comics, film, and TV: